CIRCA 1750

Details

A Chinese 'Nanking Cargo' gold rectangular ingot
Circa 1750
Cast as a bar with a shallow domed underside and gently sloping sides rising to a slightly raised edge, the top with slight encrustation and centrally stamped with a double gourd containing the characters yuan ji within two single seal characters bao (gold ingot), the underside also with stamped characters yuan and an archaistic one
8 cm. wide, 2.5 cm. deep, 1.5 cm. high at the edge, in wood box

Provenance

Christie's Amsterdam, The Nanking Cargo, Chinese export porcelain and gold, 28 April-2 May 1986, lot 1861.

Special notice

Christie's charge a premium to the buyer on the final bid price of each lot sold at the following rates: 23.8% of the final bid price of each lot sold up to and including €150,000 and 14.28% of any amount in excess of €150,000. Buyers' premium is calculated on the basis of each lot individually.

Lot Essay

The gold ingots offered in the following lots were part of the Nanking cargo, salvaged in 1985 and put up for sale at Christie's Amsterdam in the spring of 1986. The cargo included over a hundred thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, besides some finds of western metalwork, stonewares and gold. In total, 125 gold ingots were retrieved from the shipwreck, of which 8 are currently re-offered.
Used as a mean of payment in China, the ingots were rarely transported to the Western world, and having been melted down in later days in China, they are rare surviving pieces of a once-known payment system.

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